Bite Your Tongue
by Hilary Chuff
Summary: Petunia won't have magic in her house, but Lily refuses to accept that.


Five days after she disappears they find her, or at least what's left. Pieces are missing—all of the fingers on one hand, the other arm gone up to the elbow, leg lost half-way through the shin and where her other foot once was just the bone. She was loud, always was, but the rest of them—the rest of her family were quiet, playing by the new rules and minding their business and pureblood. And still dead, the lot of them.

She wonders if they started small, taking the tip of a pinky and a thumb when she didn't answer their questions, graduating to a hand and then a limb and then her mother when she still didn't confess. She wonders if Marlene said anything, then, if she managed to keep her mouth shut through her father and three brothers or if she spilled everything she had and they still killed them anyway.

James tells her it doesn't matter, but it does, it does. Marlene was in the Order, but her baby brothers, her parents—they were good pureblood members of society, never rocked the boat other than by birthing Marlene, and if she talked, if she talked and they still threw them away like so much trash—it matters.

Because Lily's not sure if she could bite her tongue.

Three days later she goes to Little Whinging. They're all she has left, and if pure blood won't save anyone, she has little doubt of what they'd do to someone without a single drop of magic.

She goes to Little Whinging, bringing her vials and cauldron and ingredients all shrunk to fit in her rucksack. She doesn't know what she'll say, hasn't planned, only thought, only rushed out the door as soon as she felt steady enough on her feet.

She apparates three blocks away and walks the rest, and it's freezing out and her coat's worn thin and last week's warming charms have seeped out of the fabric, but it doesn't matter.

Petunia answers when she knocks on the door (beats on it, really, until Petunia's got no choice but to acknowledge her), but she peeks through the peephole first and even then only opens it a crack.

"Please," Lily begs, and there are already tears gathering in her eyes, a tremble in her voice, and Petunia lets her in no further than the entryway so she won't make a scene on the sidewalk.

"What do you want?" Petunia hisses once they're inside. "I told you never to come here."

"Petunia," her voice breaks, "please, it's getting worse. It's not safe. Marlene—" The name dies halfway past her lips and she has to swallow back a sob, shake her head. "They went after her family."

Petunia says nothing, but her lips tighten into a thin line, her neck craning higher. She sets her shoulders, but Lily continues.

"They weren't fighting, Tuney, her family—they were quiet, but they went after them because of her. They weren't doing anything, they were quiet, but she was fighting so they went after them."

"Then stop fighting," Petunia hisses back, and Lily wonders why she's keeping quiet, why she's so folded in with her arms wrapped around herself, wonders if Vernon is just in the other room.

"You know that I can't," she starts, but Petunia won't have it.

"You could, but you won't—won't leave that boy, that life, that world. You could leave, be normal, be safe—"

"Don't you get it, Tuney?" she finally moans, rocking back a step to press the heels of her palms to her eyelids, taking a shaky breath. "No one's safe anymore, not me, not James, not his family, not you—pureblood, muggleborn, Muggle—no one."

Petunia says nothing, just stares, and Lily huffs a sigh.

"I can't live if anything happens to you. Please, Tuney."

"I won't have it," she says, and stiffens, and her arms unwrap to rest her hands on the soft bump of her belly that Lily hasn't noticed until now. "I won't have this house filled with your—your trickery, your hogwash. I told you no before, and now I mean it especially. I won't have it here, polluting the yard, the walls, not with a baby coming."

All the airs goes out of her in one breath, her knees weak, and she lurches forward a step even as Petunia retreats just out of reach.

"You're pregnant."

"And I won't have him around your kind, your world, especially now."

It's not the first time she's come, not the first time Tuney's told her no, but it had never felt necessary before, had always felt like an extra precaution, a good idea but not much more. Now with Marlene, with the McKinnons—she won't leave until Tuney's agreed, until she's got the wards around the house.

"You have to. Tuney, you have to. I'm telling you, they went after her family just to hurt her, there's nothing to stop them from coming after mine, from coming after yours. Even if I stop, even if I leave—they think I've, I don't know, stolen my magic, our family has. Tuney, we're from the same stuff, you're part of me, part of my family, and I know you don't know them, don't know enough to be as scared of them as I am, but I do. If anything happened to you—to your child—Let me help protect you."

She's advanced as she's spoken, and Tuney's frozen where she is. She flinches when Lily touches her, gathers her hands up, and Lily can see the wild look in her eye and doesn't let it stop her.

"Why would they come after us, why would they come here? We're not part of your world, your magic war—and you want to make us part of it by inviting magic into my house with my child?"

Tuney's voice has gone up an octave and to normal volume, nearly a screech in comparison to what it was before, and Lily can't help the way her hands tighten on her sister's.

"You're already part of it, it'll come here no matter what. At least let me use it to keep you, Vernon, your child safe."

The sob is creeping back up her throat, catching on the roof of her mouth, when Petunia finally nods, and Lily can't help tugging her forward into a too-tight embrace.

And then she goes to work, setting up her cauldron on the stove in the kitchen, standing on a chair to reach her stirrer inside it as she brings the potion from the vials to a boil. She organizes the ingredients meant to complete the last few steps of the potion, finished fresh for strength: peppermint leaves, fluxweed, pomegranate seeds and powdered sea urchin spines. And then there is one more thing.

"It's strongest if you infuse it with blood," she says carefully, and even without looking, she can feel Petunia snap to attention where she's hovering in the doorway.

"You're not coming near me with that thing," Petunia snaps shrilly, her voice trembling.

And Lily's already got her wand in her hand, but she turns slowly, raises the other, palm flat and facing Petunia in a gesture of peace. "You're my blood," she says quietly. "Let me use mine."

Petunia stares, and then nods, creeping forward, but Lily turns back to the potion, reaches one arm over it and silently touches the tip of her wand to the top of her wrist, slowly dragging it down the vein until she's spilled enough, and then tracing it back along the skin to knit it back together.

And then it's done, blending into a smooth lavender liquid as she stirs, and she reaches for the now empty vials in to fill them back up. Petunia watches from across the room, and as much as she stubbornly tries to hide it, the queasiness is writ on her face.

She follows Lily outside in to the backyard, watches nervously as Lily brandishes her wand, murmuring softly as she lays enchantments on the doors, windows, the walls themselves. And then she pulls the potion to salt the ground with it, border the property.

"It's different," Petunia sniffs, able to tell even from where she stands ten feet back. "It was yellow in Cokesworth."

Petunia's seen her do this before at their mother's, had insisted on staying to watch even when she'd refused the help herself, and she's right. Just over a year ago in December, before their mother had been too ill, the potion had turned a buttery color when she'd added their blood.

"Yes," she says quietly, but doesn't explain anymore until Petunia continues, "What did you do? Why isn't it the same as it was then? What are you doing to my house?"

She knows why it's different. It's the same reason Fabian's sister's potion was different when she'd helped with the Burrow, the same reason Alice's was different when she'd done theirs last month, the same reason Petunia's finally given in in the first place.

Still, she hasn't said the words out loud yet, not to anyone. She'd only found out while Marlene was still missing, and it hadn't seemed the time to say anything, to get herself dragged out of the search and stuck in a safehouse, and now—now it feels like it's not real if she doesn't admit it.

Lily sucks a breath through her teeth, sets her jaw, and turns to where her sister stands, hands still protectively covering her belly, and something in her chest clenches in response. "I'm pregnant, too," she says finally, letting the words leave in the whoosh of an exhale, and she's hardly done before Petunia is rushing towards her, arms in the air.

"Are you insane!?" she hisses loudly, reaching out to grab one of her shoulders and shake her. "You—you're at war, you said! Fighting for your life! God, Lily, are you even married? And where does it go if something happens to you, huh, Lily? Because it can't go here—we can't take it, we won't. Not where it can be near ours, not if it's got magic too—"

"You don't have to, you won't have to," Lily soothes instantly, and she knows she should feel stung, insulted by Petunia's revulsion at such a large part of what makes her her, how that revulsion bleeds into a child she's hardly even acknowledged yet. But the thought isn't one she hasn't already fought, isn't one she hasn't already considered. But then there's Sirius, Remus, Peter, the Longbottoms—any of them would help, she knows it, would watch out for her or him, whoever this baby is. "You won't have to," she promises again, and Petunia nods, sharp.

They finish in silence, then, Petunia following at a distance as Lily moves around the perimeter of the house, spelling the framework and foundations, dousing the dirt. And then she leaves.

Twenty-one months later, she finds a baby left on her doorstep without a word, nothing but a letter tucked into the basket beside him. She knows the writing, remembers it from ten years earlier. When he mentions her blood, Lily's blood, the blood magic that will keep Harry safe—she wonders if he knows the half of it.


End file.
